Bitter Triumph
by Malachite Aoi
Summary: A reflective drabble about a visit to the spot where someone once very cherished lay. In the neverending rivalry between these friendly foes, who really wins when everyone loses? Oneshot


Disclaimer: Cowboy Bebop and all of its places, people, events, and other such things are property of Shinichiro Watanabe, Hajime Yadate, et al. and Sunrise. I know I don't own anything.

A/N: This isn't really meant to be taken seriously. Just a writing excersize

Faye took a long drag of her cigarette. For an instant she might have remembered the sting of smoke and the dizzy sensation that had once accompanied the burning inhale of smouldering plant, paper, tar, cyanide, carbon dioxide, a bitter but welcome poison.

He had also been a bitter but welcome poison in her life. Dumb as a brick, but wiser than she cared to acknowledge, it had been too long since she had let her thoughts linger on that ghost.

As to whether or not he was really a ghost was still a mystery. Many considered him as such. So did she. She had no room in her life for wayward cowboys who chased damsels in distress down into the setting of the burning sun. Sometimes the spaghetti western was better left at that. Spaghetti; to be consumed and excremented out of one's system. Was that why he had left? Made that rash and fatal decision? To get it all out of his system?

Who would have guessed that his moll wasn't some fantastic flapper in some fringed-skirt and bawdy attire. It was a golden angel, glimmering straight out of heaven clad in tight leathers and a seductive smile. The woman with the dead-aim and crimson lips. Eyes that shone like the color of the skies from which so many were sure she had fallen from.

In a small bloom of still-burning embers and dying ash, she flicked aside the half-smoked coffin nail with a careful snap of the wrist. Would she ever forgive him for running? She doubted it.

Contrary to popular belief, Faye was not in love with that lunkhead.

But it didn't go to say that she didn't feel a certain level of mutual kinship with the guy. There was most certainly a type of forced camaraderie between the two, as well as a mutual feeling of mixed friendliness and mockery. Really, Faye felt that she was beyond love at this point. She didn't have to love him to care for him. She didn't have to want to be Julia to be a part of his life.

But there were times where she missed the smell of old, spicy cologne, the likes of which were brought cheaply from convenience stores on Mars for less than ten dollars. She missed the smell of additional smoke clogging the air heavily in a blanket of death. Sometimes she even missed the name-calling, the fighting and the urge to snap his neck in two while he slept. Though she kept that last emotion well under control.

She didn't want to be Julia. She didn't want Spike to have forgotten what that love was like. She didn't want him to love her deeply and unconditionally. She didn't care for an emotion that seemed to cause pain and be sparked from trickery and mirages of handsome men on big black horses, offering beautiful ladies a seat on their steed. What she did want, was someone who wasn't going to harangue her about the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial.

Jet harassed her incessantly for her shopping, her spending, her cockiness and her intrusive nature. He nagged her about being careful with equiptment and not to be so flippant with her ship, with her gun, with her words. Spike on the other hand, had been a breath of fresh air. He challenged her flippancy with a laid-back bravado of his own. He wreaked havoc that caused damages to rival hers. And his words and mannerisms smacked of an ongoing rivalry between the two to see who could live life more recklessly. Who could screw up the most and still escape for-the-most-part unscathed.

like she had won.

She'd had her scrapes, no doubt. Hell, it was no spit in the ocean surviving a gate collapse. Nor was the decision to become a bounty hunter, nevertheless one who worked besides such a crew of maniacs, a safe or reassuring lifetsyle. She'd tangled a bit with Vicious. Gotten in the crossfire with Julia. Tried to lend a helping hand to that moron when he couldn't let his precious pride interfere with nearly being killed by a mentally degenrating five-year-old, trapped in a thirty-something's idestructable body. But in the end it was her who was here, in this cold town in Mars, visiting the "grave" of someone she had begrudgingly labeled as "Friend".

_No, it wasn't you, Spike, who won this round. I'm still standing. God only knows where you are. Maybe you're with her. Maybe you're still around. But this is where you are to me. And this is where you will remain for the rest of my life...whatever that is._

Lighting up another smoke, this time she only took the most minute of drags to make sure the thing was properly lit, and with all the ceremony of a monk lighting incense at a temple, she placed the cigarette upon the tombstone in front of her, ignoring the rain that had started to pour, so cliche, in what seemed as a waste of a perfectly good cigarette, to a perfectly lost cause.

Walking away, with the color of bitter irony to her voice, she recited aloud the inscription on the mockery of a monument, to a supposedly deceased enemy of friendship...

"See you...Space Cowboy."

Fin


End file.
